Leading Finnish Retailer S Group Launches a Calculator That Indicates the Climate Impact of One's Shopping Basket

S Group, the leading retailer in Finland, has launched a calculator which indicates the carbon footprint of the food you've purchased. The service is a part of S Group's S-mobiili app service "Omat ostot" (My Purchases) and has been developed over a long time in cooperation with top experts at Natural Resources Institute Finland.

? Our carbon footprint calculator is a ground-breaking service even globally, as it indicates the carbon footprint of one's shopping basket at the product group level based on actual consumer data, says Lea Rankinen, Corporate Responsibility Director at SOK.

According to Rankinen, there has been a clear demand for a calculator that indicates the climate impact of food.

? In July we published our intent to launch the calculator later this autumn. Since then we have received comments from a lot of delighted customers and interest groups, as well as different development suggestions. For a retail group owned by its customers, building this kind of service based on the consumers' needs is a very natural process.

The carbon footprint calculator does not account for the climate impact of individual products, since no trustworthy and comparable data about the products is yet widely available. The calculator does, however, indicate the magnitude of the climate impact of different product groups with sufficient accuracy, as well as their impact on your individual carbon footprint.

? It's great that the calculator was developed through cooperation between Natural Resources Institute Finland and S Group. The calculator is a consumer friendly way of highlighting the climate impact of your shopping basket and bringing it closer to your everyday life. Even though Natural Resources Institute Finland has a solid knowledge of evaluating the climate impact of foods, a great deal of thought and new ways of applying the Institute's expertise has been put in to this calculator, states Hanna Hartikainen, researcher at Natural Resources Institute Finland.

For product groups where the origin of the product has a particularly strong impact on its climate effects, the origin of the best selling products within the group has been taken into account in the estimated climate impact. Such products are, among others, greenhouse vegetables.

The carbon footprint calculator, as well as the Omat ostot service of the S-mobiili app, will continue to be developed and new features will become available at a steady pace. A calculator indicating the actual degree of Finnish origin of food products will be launched in S-mobiili at the end of October.